The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews.
This free online course was produced jointly by Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. The course tracks the history of the Holocaust and has two parts. "The Holocaust - An Introduction (I): Nazi Germany: Ideology, The Jews and the World" is the first of the two courses and covers the following themes in its three weeks:
Week 1: From Hatred to Core Ideology
We will try to delve into Nazi ideology and the special place of Jews and Judaism in it. We will also discuss how the National Socialist Party converted the German Democracy of the Weimar Republic into a totalitarian regime within a short period of time, and its meaning for Jews and non-Jewish citizens.
Week 2: The World and the Jews in World War II
We will try to examine the broader contexts of the Holocaust and to place it, as part of World War 2. In this meeting we will also refer to the vital Jewish world to be found under various Nazi occupations and influences.
Week 3: The Isolation Abyss - the Perspective of the Individual
We will try to reveal different aspects of Jewish life in the face of the badge of shame, ghettos and segregation, as well as the formation of individual, societies’ and leader’s reactions in the face of a consistent policy of dispossession and discrimination.
Once you’ve completed this course, you can continue your learning with The Holocaust - An Introduction (II): The Final Solution
This online course is offered in an innovative, multi-level format, comprising:
* Comprehensive lectures by leading researchers from Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem.
* A wealth of voices and viewpoints presented by guest lecturers.
* Numerous documents, photos, testimonies and works of art from the time of the Holocaust.
* Novel learning experience: Crowd sourcing – involving the learners themselves in the act of collecting and shaping information, via unique, exciting online assignments.
REQUIREMENTS:
This course is designed for anyone with an interest in the Holocaust, including students, teachers, academics and policy-makers.

From the lesson

The World and the Jews in World War II

We will try to examine the broader contexts of the Holocaust and to position it as a part of a various global conflicts that took place during world war 2. In this context, we will focus in a number of unique realities that were formed and created in Occupied Poland and France using them to identify key practices of Nazi Germany, European companies and the Jews who lived among them. We’ll look at the different fates of Jews in various European countries before and during World War 2, through the lens of the enormous changes which the Jewish world underwent in modern times: emancipation, secularization, urbanization and emigration.

Meet the Instructors

Professor Havi Dreifuss, PhD

ProfessorHavi Dreifuss is a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at TAU; heads the Center for Research of Holocaust History in Poland, Yad Vashem.

Dr Na'ama Bela Shik, PhD

Director, Educational Technology Department, The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad VashemThe International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem

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>> We have seen that within a few years Nazi Germany occupied or

controlled most of Europe and

tried to shape the whole continent according to Nazi racist ideology.

This is, of course, very interesting.

Yet, why should we, in a course which deals with the holocaust,

the destruction of the Jewish people during the second world war,

concern ourselves with all those different types of occupation?

Well, we should state clearly,

Jewish life was inherently connected to its surroundings.

One cannot understand the complexity of the holocaust and

the varying Jewish experiences in it while neglecting the wider historical context.

Nazi genocidal ideology demanded the total removal of the Jews.

Yet, the maners in which the Jews were removed from the public sphere throughout

Europe before they were murdered varied greatly depending on local factors.

For the Nazis, western and

eastern European Jews symbolized different aspects of the Jewish danger.

The Western Jews, not always easily identified as a Jew,

was seen as carrying within him all the destructive Jewish traits.

And the authentic traditional Jewish Eastern one was perhaps a scary

as intimidating as has been emphasized in Nazi propaganda for years.

For Nazi Germany, it didn't matter who this or that specific Jew was,

where they lived, how they dressed or how old they were.

Their very Jewishness was enough to deny them all human rights.

Yet, the anti-Jewish policies could not always be easily implemented,

especially in western countries where the local public opinion

was taken into some account.

The Germans could shoot Jews in the streets of any city in Poland or

Lithuania without the need to take into consideration the local response.

But this would not be done in Paris, Amsterdam or Antwerp.

For Nazi Germany, the public's prefer

of west European societies could not be stained publicly with Jewish blood.

This deferentiality shaped not only Jewish life, but

also the very different Jewish understandings regarding the nature of.

But for now, it is sufficient to stress that even in times of extreme segregation

of the Jews from their surroundings, their life was very much influenced

by the occupation pattern implemented in their various homelands.

Before demonstrating this by focusing on two specific realities,

occupied Poland on the one hand, and Paris under Nazi rule on the other,

let's have an important discussion from the historian's desk.

In this course in general, and

in the last unit in particular, we have used many visual documents.

Photographs, short films, and as well as artwork created by Jews or non-Jews.

We use those historical documents in order to help you deepen and

better understand a specific aspect of some of our topics.

What are those visual sources, and who made them?

Some of them are personal documents, pictures and film are taken by people,

mainly German soldiers, while advancing throughout Europe.

Others are official documents,

mainly film by the German Propaganda Campaign of the army.

The German army had special units which were supposed to provide raw materials for

the well oiled Nazi propaganda machine under the direction of Joseph Goebbels.

For example, on October 2, 1939,

a month after the invasion of Poland, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda

gave the Vermacht Propaganda Division the following guidelines.

Send film of Jewish types from Warsaw and throughout all of occupied Poland,

both character studies and pictures of Jews at forced labor.

This material is intended to strengthen our antisemitic propaganda campaign

at home and abroad.

Still, photos and movies were filmed and

gathered in order to demonstrate to the German people

the victories of the Germany's military and the triumph of its ideology.

Proper segments were chosen and

shown in the cinema in the Die Deutsche Wochenschau, the German weekly news reels.

In times of no TV and Internet, this was a useful tool to pass information,

or more precisely, a very specific part of the information

that which was suitable to the regime's ideology and emphasized it.

Let's watch, for example, a minute of the Wochenschau number 567 from July,

1941, describing the occupation of Riga as part of operation

Barbarossa mentioned a few minutes ago.

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>> What can we learn from this segment?

One might think, understandably, I must admit,

that this is just an expected part of Nazi propaganda.

With occupation of the victorious Germans forcibly taught the lazy Jews

the true meaning of physical work.

Unfortunately, this is not even close to the horror those pictures revealed.

Who for years headed the Photo Archives,

managed to identify those Jews in the pictures.

Apparently, they were not photographed in Riga, Latvia, but in Shavli, Lithuania.

They were not part of a sadistic re-education.

But what we see here are the last minutes in the lives

of some prominent Jews from Shavli arrested on the 28th of June, 1941.

They come on the next day to a near forest,

forced to dig their graves, and shot to death.

How do we know that?

Because some pictures of the murdered Jews were recognized by Shavli Jews

long before this film resurfaced.

This is Elizer Ilya Pen.

And here is Rabbi Yitzkhak Nakhumovski and

Rabbi Yitzkhak Rabinovitz minutes before they were shot to death.

We will discuss those terrible act of mass murders in shooting pits which were part

of their effort to annihilate European Jews in the second half of this course.

Yet, for

now, I want us to limit ourself and ask what can we learn from those pictures.

Do they lie?

Or is it only our misguided understanding?

Is a picture or a film really worth a thousand words?

Yes, and no.

Photographs and

films are just another historical document we should use carefully and critically.

Like any other source, we should place them in the wide historical context and

ask ourself who took them, when and

why, what do they show us, and what do they conceal.

As we have just seen, and we will see this in the future, since most of the visual

documentation during the Holocaust was created by German forces,

many times the most important part of the story is the one we don't see.

The one that is concealed.

Maybe even more misleading are the cases in which the German images show us

the whole picture, but

a picture colored in dangerous antisemitic ideological colors.

>> Photography, both official and private, was the central media in Nazi Germany.

After it came to power, the Nazi party and the Nazi state used

photography as a central element in it's media and in it's propaganda.

Private photography also prospered as more cameras were produced and

as more people purchased them.

When World War II broke out, the use of cameras intensified.

Military events and the newly occupied territories provided official and

private photographers many interesting objects for photography.

Among them, were ethnic groups defined as hostile by Nazi propaganda.

Photos of Jews, Slavs, and black-French soldiers became quite widespread.

Where there are a couple of examples for this kind of photography.

Here we have an album that includes photos that were taken in one of

the Polish ghettos during 1940 which depicts not only

typical what the Germans defined as types, Jewish types inside the ghetto.

But also used the acceptable way of presenting ethnical groups,

ethnical members of ethnical groups, in the Nazi propaganda.

Putting the person in the middle of the street, posing him,

and trying to take advantage of this angle in order to capture

his ethnical features, his facial and bodily ethnical features.

Another example that I have here is a sort of an album

created by a German soldier during 1940 during the battle of France.

What we see here, and this is quite interesting,

is not only photos that depict the battlefields, military equipment,

German soldiers and so on, but also photos depicting POWs.

French POWs are not simple POWs, but black POWs.

Members of those colonial troops serving within the French army.

The influence of Nazi ideology on photography came into play not only

in the choice of subjects, but also in the composition of the photos, as we just saw.

The visual influence of ideology was enhanced, in many cases,

by the texts inscribed on the other side of the photos or next to them.

Cynical remarks, like Jewish mob, and

this is how the chosen people looks like, were added to both private and

official photos reflecting Nazi anti-Semitic vocabulary.

>> Unfortunately, most of the photographs we have showing the Jews during

the Holocaust are Nazi German icons with all that is implied.

A reflection of an anti-Semitic vision of the Jews.

Nazi racist ideology not only guided the German official documentation, but

also penetrated the personal ones.

Thus, one of our greatest challenges in this course

in documentary films in exhibitions on the Holocaust, and so on,

is to show victims of the Nazis as human beings while one of our main tools,

the visuals, include many anti-Semitic stereotypes which dehumanize them.

Many times we don't have alternative sources.

But we must be aware of these implanted biases.

In our next meeting, when we'll try to understand the internal life of

Jews during the Holocaust, we'll present some unique collection of photographs

taken by Jews during the war which, again, like any other historical document,

will have the specific biases that we should consider.

But what I want us to remember from this short exercise is how careful we must be,

not only with written documents, but also with visual ones which could,